STOP SPANKING

More and more teens are becoming depressed. The numbers of young people
suffering from depression in the last 10 years has risen worryingly, an
expert says.

BBC, UK, August 3, 2004

Government statistics suggest one in eight adolescents now has depression.

Unless doctors recognise the problem, more could slip through the net,
says Professor Tim Kendall of the National Collaborating Centre for Mental
Health.

Guidelines on treating childhood depression will be published next year.
Professor Kendall says a lot more needs to be done to treat the illness.
More..

Corporal Punshment - Spanking Laws In Canada

'Right to spank' law called public health threat

Law permitting physical punishment at odds with public
health messages

CBC, February 6, 2012

A museum exhibit in Uruguay depicting forms of punishment in school is
popular but thinking on physical punishment has shifted internationally
since the UN adopted the Convention on Rights of the Child in 1990.
(Reuters)

The Criminal Code's justification for physical punishment of children
such as spanking should be removed, Canadian researchers say.

Monday's issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal includes a
paper reviewing how the understanding of the effects of physical
punishment of children has shifted dramatically in 20 years.

Children who have experienced physical punishment tend to be more
aggressive toward parents, siblings, peers and, later, spouses, and are
more likely to develop antisocial behaviour, said Joan Durrant, of the
department of family social sciences at the University of Manitoba and
Ron Ensom of Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa.

Physical punishment is also associated with a variety of mental
health problems, such as depression, anxiety and use of drugs and alcohol.

Pain from punishment could disrupt parent-child attachment, increase
levels of the stress hormone cortisol or interfere with how the brain
regulates stress, Durrant and Ensom suggested.

They noted that when parents in more than 500 families were trained
to reduce their use of physical punishment, the difficult behaviours in
the children also declined.

'Never spank' health message

The authors called on doctors to educate parents on child development
to reduce angry and punitive responses to normal child behaviours and to
provide resources on positive discipline.

Messages such as Toronto Public Health's "Spanking hurts more than
you think" and the Public Health Agency of Canada's "Never spank!"
should be reinforced.

"Physicians can urge the federal government to remove Section 43 from
the Criminal Code, which provides legal justification for the use of
physical punishment, thereby undermining public health initiatives," the
authors concluded.

The
Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 2004 that parents have the right to
spank their children. But the country's top court also set out
"reasonable limits."

Those limits include:

Spanking could be used against children between the ages of two
and 12 years old.

The authors said that effective discipline depends on "clear and
age-appropriate expectations, effectively communicated within a trusting
relationship and a safe environment."

More than 400 organizations in Canada have endorsed the Joint
Statement on Physical Punishment of Children and Youth, which encourages
positive approaches to discipline and states that physical punishment of
children and youth plays "no useful role in their upbringing and poses
only risks to their development."